“The downside to series television is that the schedule is ferocious. It constantly feels like you have a midterm due that you haven’t started yet.”

The thing I know how to do most is write a play. I came up loving plays and learning about plays and writing plays. I actually feel like an outsider when I’m writing movies and television.

It’s important to remember that, first and foremost, if not only, this is entertainment. ‘The West Wing’ isn’t meant to be good for you.

We live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns.

I want to convey that I’m crazy about the Kardashians – but I’m not sure which is which.

I’m terribly afraid of failure. When your identity is wrapped up in writing and you’ve written something that doesn’t work, it’s a tough pill to swallow.

The hardest thing for me is getting started. If I’m writing a script, really 90 per cent of it would be just walking around, climbing the walls, just trying to put the idea together. Then the final 10 per cent would be writing it.

If you can socialize from the privacy of your desk at night in a dark room, you can be a smoother, cooler, funnier, sexy, more everything person than you actually are in real life.

Toby: All right. It couldn’t have gone far, right? Sam: No. Toby: Somewhere in this building…is our talent.

Josh: So, Toby, it’s election night. What do you say about a country that goes out of its way to protect even those citizens that try to destroy it? Toby: God bless America.

If you feel that strongly about something, you have an obligation to try and change my mind.

Writing anything, it sorta starts the way you’d build a castle at the beach. You’re just taking your hands and you’re mounting up sand.

Trying to guess what the (mass) audience wants and then trying to satisfy that is usually a bad recipe for getting something good.

It seems to me that more and more we’ve come to expect less and less from each other, and I think that should change.

Any time you get two people in a room who disagree about anything, the time of day, there is a scene to be written. That’s what I look for.

I’m a registered Republican, I only seem liberal because I believe that hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure and not gay marriage.

There are television critics, movie critics, and theater critics too who I like and who I follow and I get genuinely bummed when they don’t like something that I’ve written because I usually agree with them.

The talent on YouTube is incredible, and it can spread like wildfire. The downside is that it’s very hard to convince the younger generation that they should pay for music.

There’s no downside to having too much experience.

There are many upsides to being the studio executive, but one of the downsides is that you get removed from the actual process of making the movie.